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My problem here is that Tizen although developed by big companies with the same or similar reasons is not scrutinized as Canonical.What makes you so sure that you are going to have more freedom on particular device that is developed by intel and samsung that are not going to available on uphone.People can't stop talking about u-fcking-phone but fuck if I heard a peep about Tizen.

There haven't been any controversial things about Tizen yet for people to fixate on. Sure, I guess people could complain about the parts that are under Flora license, but those are to my knowledge just userland apps that can relatively easily be replaced for a hypothetical full-OSS version.

Only time I hear it is in the context of Canonical or Samsung budging in on Androids turf over theirs back.

What? That's stupid. The smartphone market is only about 60% saturated, tops. There's plenty of room for at least a couple more open source operating systems.

Let me tell you something,core components of Tizen are OSS but that is as far as you are going to get with this OS.You are sadly mistaken that you are going to have little bit more influence on this OS than on uPhone or Sailfish.Which in itself not so bad.Have fun making distro for that device when vision for your phone doesnt match with theirs.
They are developing UX that they feel is best for them.That is fucking PERIOD.In that regard they are all the same.You are going to have to adhere to their vision.This is nature of mobile platform.On desktop you can escape this but not on phone !

And? It's open source if the source is open. Samsung/Intel can choose whatever development model they want, as long as they release it open source, which means that anyone can take the code and fork their own version of Tizen to run on the device of their choice.

Chances are if you are going to put something different instead of that particular OS you are going to have to change everything from the top layer and that means fragmentation.

Pointless and baseless speculation.

Which means you get Android but with Wayland who can't run on all devices because all drivers that are going to bee available are proprietary (Tegra and everything else ) . People are running on real delusion here that Wayland is magical unicorn that will bring and I'm not fcking kidding here :

Misinformation and strawman argument. Wayland can use Android drivers just the same as Android itself. The code that Mir uses for using Android drivers was originally developed for Wayland.

I really hate that everybody today are so easily stuped by this that all you have to say is "Wayland" and fuck you are peoples favorite.
I just want people to be appreciative of some things that Canonical is doing and by that I mean in market adoption.

Wayland really is the best possible display server. Without Mir, we could have finally gotten real convergence on the entire Linux ecosystem, mobile and desktop alike. Everything running on the same display server and being compatible. Because of Mir, that's not going to be the case, which is reason enough to hate Mir.

Canonical is doing nothing except building a new walled garden, to separate themselves from other Linux distros. It's a power grab, nothing more.

No doubt but without drivers you are having best car with train wheels.It only goes in one direction.

Mir isn't any more likely to get driver support than Wayland is.

Also, Wayland WILL get driver support, both on the desktop and on mobile. On the mobile side, we have Intel, Samsung, Jolla, all investing in Wayland, and they have enough power to make driver support happen. On the desktop side, we have Red Hat, which will go with Wayland, and both nvidia and AMD will want to support Red Hat because of server farms.

Hmmm,...so we have here a bunch of OS-s and we want android apps running on virtual machine.Good point, I was hopping to have native apps that are free to run on any platform on Linux as their platforms see fit.But ok,that is just you. Just to make point here.It's ok to run Android PROPRIETARY drivers "nothing wrong there" and it's ok to run Android apps on android dalvik machine on top of another platform.Good greef what a way to sell FULL ( PURE ) linux OS to masses on every platform.And YOU are saying it's not ok to have Mir ? So reasons to port apps from Android are ?????!!!

No, Android apps will be running on ACL, on Tizen and Sailfish. You can also run regular Linux software on both, and additionally, you can run Meego apps on Sailfish. It's about compatibility and giving the user the best possible functionality. Ubuntu is being silly and stubborn if they think that by saying "hey devs, we're not supporting android apps so you better develop some native apps for us" is going to work. All they do is make a disservice to their users by denying them the possibility of using the existing extensive library of Android apps. But I guess compatibility with anything that is not developed in-house is blasphemy to Canonical these days...

People here are mouthful how Wayland is superior although it's been built to be as simple as possible and Mir is just a copy although not really.I was hopping to get a dialog in which way is it better and why.Usually everybody get defensive and just say : "ubuntu developed mir in secret","wayland developers told mir developers that is not smart to have things done on ... fit missing part" and thing get moot.You really cant blame Canonical for choosing GPLv3 ti limit to some degree fragmentation.I think there was good discussion on this subject between developers on linux community council and there is good video from Stallman why is it important to have it.So it really is bitchy to moan about something that Linux Foundation approves.I'm not so sure about CLA.From this forum nobody ever outlined benefits and disadvantages of this thing so I assume it's a bad thing because fuck me I'm not ready some document on their site.

Mir is unncecessary and pointless. There's no reason, technical or otherwise, why it should be developed. Every reason Canonical has given for it's development has been shown to be false. With Wayland, we could have had compatibility accross the board, and an easy transition away from X. Thanks to Canonical, that's not going to happen.

There haven't been any controversial things about Tizen yet for people to fixate on. Sure, I guess people could complain about the parts that are under Flora license, but those are to my knowledge just userland apps that can relatively easily be replaced for a hypothetical full-OSS version.

I'm just concerned in terms of getting the drivers and getting big players to collaborate.It's fine now but if Tizen gets big a lot of other big players are going to want a piece of that cake and I'm worried what that response will be from Samsung.I really don't want OS centered to cater someone else s technologies.It was hard enough to get phone manufacturers to deal with mess that came with ARM.

What? That's stupid. The smartphone market is only about 60% saturated, tops. There's plenty of room for at least a couple more open source operating systems.

It's not.Take a look around the sites that follow this kind of things.Almost universal reaction to Tizen and Firefox OS was : "unimaginative","repetitive","to little to late",same for Tizen.There is a nice group of people around it but that is pretty much about it.Even when Firefox OS first get it's debut, concern was raised because of iphone (first) way of doing things.Remember,first iphone was all web.People see these OSs as cheap.60% I'll guess I will have to take your word on it because everyone else think It's nightmare to get successful today in smartphone space.

And? It's open source if the source is open. Samsung/Intel can choose whatever development model they want, as long as they release it open source, which means that anyone can take the code and fork their own version of Tizen to run on the device of their choice.

There are no issues her I guess if you take fragmentation problem into consideration.I'm fine by it but not everyone wants distro spinoffs and to point again on first comment.So you get here group off people who follow like fans some OS like people do with iphone and people that have to reinvent everything from ground up.Its fine to say that now but it remains to see how other players are going to be fine with idea distros on smartphones,tablets,TV-s and everything else.It's already hard enough to get support for Allwinner board imagine that with brand new display server and no drivers.If that happens all that will remain from this push are sea of dead OSs.What use of wayland then ? Lets imagine that they fail and only remaining lingering OS is Ubuntu.Canonical would have all the say.

Chances are if you are going to put something different instead of that particular OS you are going to have to change everything from the top layer and that means fragmentation.
Pointless and baseless speculation.

Again,this can be levitated with plugins like Gnome does but take a look how well(bad) that works now.I doubt they will bother to cater to everybody's needs.Few broken eggs,who gives a shit,right ?
So again you have to take that particular code and fork it witch in this case I'm repeating myself to much.My main issues here is fragmentation I was not very clear in that comment I admit that.

Which means you get Android but with Wayland who can't run on all devices because all drivers that are going to bee available are proprietary (Tegra and everything else ) . People are running on real delusion here that Wayland is magical unicorn that will bring and I'm not fcking kidding here :

Misinformation and strawman argument. Wayland can use Android drivers just the same as Android itself. The code that Mir uses for using Android drivers was originally developed for Wayland.

Mir isn't any more likely to get driver support than Wayland is.

Also, Wayland WILL get driver support, both on the desktop and on mobile. On the mobile side, we have Intel, Samsung, Jolla, all investing in Wayland, and they have enough power to make driver support happen. On the desktop side, we have Red Hat, which will go with Wayland, and both nvidia and AMD will want to support Red Hat because of server farms.
I was wrong here in terms of driver support i was under impression that Mir doesn't use libhybris anymore.For some strange reason I thought that that libhybris was just some wrapper and that canonical re purpose it more aggressively directly into Mir. My bad

Wayland really is the best possible display server. Without Mir, we could have finally gotten real convergence on the entire Linux ecosystem, mobile and desktop alike. Everything running on the same display server and being compatible. Because of Mir, that's not going to be the case, which is reason enough to hate Mir.

Canonical is doing nothing except building a new walled garden, to separate themselves from other Linux distros. It's a power grab, nothing more.

This is what I hate about this situation.Wayland is best option ,yes.But can someone please make a serious article on differences between the two and not include their bitchiness and morality.Im not going to say anything about walled gardens because I'm still waiting to see how will this pan out.

You don't buy the program. You buy the license to use it. Not to study its code, not to reverse engineer it.

Not "to use it", but you buy the non-exclusive, non-transferable, time-limited, warranty-free, revokable at any time and without reasoning, without grand of patents, right to use the version of the software on a limited number of machines (usually 1).

And usually, the "version" is quickly depleted, while they use money to postulate themself as a one and only standard and also copy-paste opensource code (MIT, BSD and the like).

I am with nightmarex on this one, people should demand opensource version. Kickstarter is nothing different, but a buy-out.
Instead people tolerate this and get back what they deserve. And when someone starts something like GPL, the proprietary devs and users "suddenly" cry like babies. And if one allows proprietary, there is suddenly requirements for DRM in HTML5, requirements for stable base to write proprietary for freedom system; it repeats again and again.

I'm just concerned in terms of getting the drivers and getting big players to collaborate.It's fine now but if Tizen gets big a lot of other big players are going to want a piece of that cake and I'm worried what that response will be from Samsung.I really don't want OS centered to cater someone else s technologies.It was hard enough to get phone manufacturers to deal with mess that came with ARM.

It's going to get hard anyway.

It's not.Take a look around the sites that follow this kind of things.Almost universal reaction to Tizen and Firefox OS was : "unimaginative","repetitive","to little to late",same for Tizen.There is a nice group of people around it but that is pretty much about it.Even when Firefox OS first get it's debut, concern was raised because of iphone (first) way of doing things.Remember,first iphone was all web.People see these OSs as cheap.60% I'll guess I will have to take your word on it because everyone else think It's nightmare to get successful today in smartphone space.

Where is this "universal" reaction? From what I see, people have been pretty excited about Sailfish and Firefox OS, and to a lesser extent Tizen (which is still less known, so there's not so much noise about it).

And the logic of 60% is sound: of the global cellphone market, that's the amount that is currently smartphones, the rest are still dumbphones. With the tech getting cheaper, it's predicted that all (or near enough all) cellphones will be smartphones within the next 10 years or so. That means there's room for the smartphone market to grow almost double its current size. That's not even considering the market growth that comes with industrialization of previously poor and underdeveloped regions.

People who think it's impossible for new players to get in the smartphone game are not thinking clearly. It's a volatile market, which means things can change rapidly. Remember that iphone was leading until recently, before that, Nokia.

There are no issues her I guess if you take fragmentation problem into consideration.I'm fine by it but not everyone wants distro spinoffs and to point again on first comment.So you get here group off people who follow like fans some OS like people do with iphone and people that have to reinvent everything from ground up.Its fine to say that now but it remains to see how other players are going to be fine with idea distros on smartphones,tablets,TV-s and everything else.It's already hard enough to get support for Allwinner board imagine that with brand new display server and no drivers.If that happens all that will remain from this push are sea of dead OSs.What use of wayland then ? Lets imagine that they fail and only remaining lingering OS is Ubuntu.Canonical would have all the say.

What? I can't really follow your train of thought. Why would there be no drivers? Why would everyone except Ubuntu fail?

Again,this can be levitated with plugins like Gnome does but take a look how well(bad) that works now.I doubt they will bother to cater to everybody's needs.Few broken eggs,who gives a shit,right ?
So again you have to take that particular code and fork it witch in this case I'm repeating myself to much.My main issues here is fragmentation I was not very clear in that comment I admit that.

You're complaining about fragmentation, while you defend Canonical and Mir? How does that make sense?

Anyway fragmentation doesn't really matter as long as there is compatibility. We have tons of desktop environments and window managers, and you can still run the same software on pretty much all of them, even when they're based on different toolkits.

Bootloader lock-in, root permbit lock-in, and carrier lock-in, oh my!

Originally Posted by Krysto

Does this mean that you wouldn't be able to make "ROMs" of Ubuntu Touch, like you can for Android? Or could you still do that?

tl;dr == GPL3 strongly suggests Ubuntu is going to be the best platform for custom ROMs, since that was one of the main *points* of the invention of GPL3 (anti-tivoization clause). However, in practice it depends on handset OEMs, chipset suppliers, carriers, brick-n-mortar retailers, and so on: Canonical is not a free agent, and may have to use their CLA power to proprietarize (is that even a word) their nominally-GPL-software, until they have significant-bordering-on-dominant marketing power. Wayland folks are not only planning on shipping proprietary mobile devices, with locked firmware, they have already done it -- Raspberry Pi, and the gpgpu firmware which controls both the bootloader and the cpu-unlock (not to mention the gpu itself of course). But that one early example of wayland behavior, or at least of one of the wayland bigwigs -- which is perfectly fine under the MIT license I will point out -- may not be indicative of how the really large wayland players will do things (intel and samsung), or how the other small wayland players will do things (jolla).

Full-size version == The only true answer to your question is, nobody knows. There are no actual phones running Mir, or even any announced models that will soon be. Tizen, ditto. There are no actual phones running Wayland, by which I mean the wayland that will ship with Fedora 20 or Fedora 21. There *is* an actual phone (prototype -- you cannot buy it) running Sailfish, which is presumably running Wayland, or maybe not yet? Hard to say for certain. There is also wayland, a closed-source version of it written by Daniel Stone's company Collabora, running on the Raspberry Pi bareboard PC (it has an off-brand iPhone core so maybe it counts as a phone).

That said, phoronix is all about speculation prior to the facts being known! :-) Okay, that is a bit harsh. In any case, I can provide you with some speculation of my own; take it with a grain of salt. First of all, you are asserting that one can run ROMs on an android device. By which you mean, unlock the bootloader, acquire root, and install the firmware of your choice, including the OS of your choice. However, I will note that usually (more than half the time) doing such things is not something you look up in the user manual, where it has a nice section on Custom Operating System Installation Procedures... and certainly not something about which you can call the 800 number for tech support. Not only do you usually void your warranty when you jailbreak an android, you can only do so by exploiting a security flaw that permits you to somehow (varies by device model) unlock the bootloader and/or login as root. Nowadays, it is quite possible to specifically search on forums beforehand, and typically there is at least *one* model of android smart phone for every carrier, and several models of android tablets, which can be jailbroken using instructions from xda or similar websites. There are even some tablets that ship that way, like zareason sells for $300. But it's not the norm!

Anyways, to rephrase your question, what are the chances that mir-based mobile devices in general, and phones in particular, will be shipped from the factory with root-login and unlocked-bootloader (and ideally non-carrier-locked sim cards for the phones). As I said, nobody knows, but my educated guess is that there will be a premier Luxury Elite Ubuntu Phone that costs you $500+ in cash on the nail, which is fully unlocked. It may not have open-source drivers, but it will be close enough to libre for most people, with plenty of GPL3 protection, and you will be able to install all kinds of stuff onto it. However, actually getting a phone in the usual way, at a walmart or somesuch, is an entirely different proposition. There is a retailer involved. There is a carrier involved. There is a high-volume handset manufacturer involved. There are a bunch of component-vendors involved (think complicated DSP baseband chip rather than simple capacitor here). There are the usual bloatware partners that the retailer/carrier/OEM folks are used to making money from. Finally, at the tail end of everything, there is teensy tiny leetle bittey Canonical and Tizen and Sailfish... sitting at the kiddie-table, while Google/Motorola and Microsoft/Nokia and Apple/iPhone run things. Maybe canonical will stick to their guns, and insist on GPL3 hardware drivers for all their handsets and all the components thereof. Maybe they will be intransigent, and insist on warranty-supported root password access, fully documented bootloader, and firmware that is under GPL3. But that is not very likely. Google purposely built android as a GPL2 kernel with custom-written permissive-license userland, because they knew in order to bring carriers/handsets to the table back in 2009 and 2010, they were going to have to compromise their founding don't-be-evil principles. Ubuntu has *closed* bug number one on launchpad. Shuttleworth might be willing to sacrifice today, in terms of proprietary binary-blob drivers, in terms of carrier-locked bootloaders, in terms of retailer-or-carrier-mandated-bloatware, and so on... in the hope that someday, if and when ubuntu-based devices have significant mindshare and significant market-share and therefore significant clout at the big-person-table, he can then demand GPL3 firmware, drivers, et cetera. Nobody has a clue what will happen five years from now; most likely, Shuttleworth will not get a chance to even consider such a decision, because Canonical will have gone down in flames, or sold out to Oracle, or just become a mediocrity like Novell (zing! okay -- that was somewhat uncalled for -- but the truth hurts and the truth is that Novell made a patent-deal with microsoft because they needed to or they would die).

As for the other options, what are the chances that Sailfish-from-Jolla will have an unlocked bootloader, no bloatware, and root password right off the bat? Well, the chances are good, from what I can tell. But you'll only be able to get their hardware if you live next door to their headquarters, or maybe in Shanghai -- none of the big carriers has been biting, they are having trouble getting roll-out plans made for Western Europe let alone USA and Japan and Aussies and so on, plus if memory serves they depend on hardware which is currently not guaranteed to continue being produced even another six months (STmicro and Nokia or Ericsson or somesuch... some kind of hardware partnership that is breaking up with no new funding plan forthcoming to my knowledge). Speculation, as mentioned, but I'm guessing that Jolla will be content to remain a niche player, selling high-priced units to individual western nerds via their own website (i.e. not retail), and trying to make a splash in China... enough so that they can build up the cash for the second wave, and then the third wave, of devices. Needless to say, also a very risky strategy. Or maybe the Jolla-and-Sailfish folks will fold, and give the carriers what they demand. They already have binary drivers, methinks, and maybe some other part of the Jolla stack is proprietary? I've not looked into them deeply enough.

Tizen is a tricky call. Unlike the Jolla shoe-string-budget (now that Nokia is out) hardware-company, and the Ubuntu outsider-game software-company, there is some serious backing behind Tizen: Samsung for phones, and Intel for tablets-and-maybe-phablets-and-MAYBE-even-smartphones. Intel is heavily invested in Wayland... so much so that they have refused (for purely political reasons) to accept Canonical's patches for mir into the upstream Xorg repo which is "owned" by the Intel developers. As for samsung, they are the biggest name in phones right now, having unseated Nokia as the volume leader. But as another person pointed out, both Intel and Samsung have screwed the pooch at software in the past: samsung with bada, and Intel with maemo/meego (of which the last remaining leftovers were renamed sailfish aka jolla). Maybe there is a possibility that Samsung will use their now-pretty-dominant position as a handset maker, and Intel will use their still-dominant position as a CPU maker, to produce something great. Maybe they will price it so that the market can afford it. Maybe they will even make the software stack properly... but both Google and Apple have a lot of hard-earned experience pleasing demanding software-consumers, whereas Intel and Samsung do not (mention previous failures here again -- plus note that samsung phone sales are propped up by google software and intel chip sales are propped up by both google and to some degree apple -- and of course intel and microsoft go way back, but what about samsung and windows CE devices?). Anyhoo, although clearly Intel and Samsung are not small fish, which means they don't have most of the challenges facing Jolla and even Canonical, it is absolutely positively true that Tizen has a serious uphill battle against entrenched leader Android, and former tag-team powerhouses Nokia slash Microsoft slash Skype. Certainly the samsung-intel combo has the market power to insist on unlocked bootloaders and root password by default, and maybe even unlocked sim cards... but will they? Samsung has little history with that approach, although they do now seem to be more welcoming of the rom-and-modding world than their competitors. Intel tends to have a very open approach to software, as far as their PC hardware goes... but they have a new cpu-socket and a new ram-socket with every generation, plus distinct mobile-cpu-sockets and mobile-ram-sockets every generation... not to mention UEFI... they are not averse to lock-in, when they can get it. I'm a pessimist, so I personally predict that exactly 0% of the first-generation Tizen phones will officially support root & boot freedom, but given the breadth of Samsung's likely offering, probably at least a quarter of their Tizen models will be jailbroken within a few months of release. In the long run, though, who knows?

To me, the more interesting question is, what happens five years from now. Apple is obviously never going to make their hardware anything but a locked-down pathway into the enduser's pocket, with permissive license open-source at the core, but plenty of proprietary lock-in surrounding it. Microsoft is going to make Win8 succeed on PC desktops -- what a huge lost opportunity for the internecine Linux distros to gobble up market-share from the 20% of folks that are still clinging to winXP! -- and with the help of desktops plus Nokia is going to make some kind of a dent in the phone world, also. I actually predict that Microsoft will be less locked-down than Apple: they won't *really* mind you buying their win8phone, 'de-securing' the bootloader, and then manually installing some Linux distro on top, any more than they really mind people that pay the windows-tax in the retail store 'de-securing' the BIOS and then dual-booting Linux ever after. Google is basically the wildcard: they want to have the support of the open-source world, and do better at garnering it than apple. They *really* only care about monitoring your every phonecall and keystroke and pageview, and not so much about selling software, let alone selling moto-phones -- those are just icing. Google therefore might therefore decide to standardize on unlocked bootloaders, and something akin to a root password... as long as there is a hardware keylogger and a firmware packet-redirector under the hood.

p.s. I'm with kUrbla btw ... the hardware-driver-situation is the key here, and under that umbrella topic the nvidia/amd drivers for desktops is relatively a *very* tiny concern ... all those proprietary android drivers are the big near-term and mid-term worry.